The challenges to writing second person fiction do not apply only to second person fiction, which is to say that they have to do with persuading the reader to abandon their doubt. All of fiction involves overcoming the resistance readers have toward circumstances that conflict with their own sense of reality. The difference is, second person has to overcome this resistance hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of times as the story unfolds. In a fantasy story, we might have to accept, broadly, the premise that magic exists or that dragonfolk walk among us. But in a second person story, we have to accept, in a really minute way, that yes, you do lift your hand to your face to wipe sweat from your brow when you are not doing that at all. 

Second person fiction is confrontational. It forces the narrator and the reader into an alignment of opposition. In third person or first person, the reader is free to identify with the narrator at their own leisure, guided of course by the rhythms of the narration itself. Consider the way that Jane Austen coaxes us, in moments of great emotion, to identify with Anne Eliot in Persuasion, but when the moment passes, we ebb away from her and to a more aloof narrative distance. But in second person fiction, the reader is forced into identification with a character for the duration of the story. You are a young, West Indian woman being told how to wash in clothes in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” You are a privileged white guy on a coke bender in Bright Lights, Big City. You are a witty adulteress in Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be an Other Woman.” There is no room to breathe in the second person. We do not flow in and around the character so much as hurtle along through the narrative space, the world of the story rising up to meet us like passing cars on the highway. What makes second person so challenging to write is that the author must overcome the reader’s response to this forced identification with the you of the story. 

But that identification is one of the great strengths of second person. The author can force the reader into a position of uncomfortable subjectivity or implication. Or the author can, with a few deft strokes, conjure the eerie, oblique angle between a person who has been traumatized and their sense of themself. Yes, second person is a POV that discomforts in part because it refuses to erase the artifice inherent in storytelling, but this artifice, when done successfully, gives the story a three-dimensional aspect. Second person stories can be playfully meta or crushingly profound. 

Below, you will find a sampling of second person stories from the Recommended Reading Archives, selected by the editors. —BT

“How Does a Person Become a Nun? A Practical Guide” by Blair Hurley

Blair Hurley demonstrates the formal play possible with second person in “How Does a Person Become a Nun?” The story’s structure is drawn from the set of steps one makes toward taking vows. The reader watches as Molly and her mother, who is an Easter/Christmas Catholic and a feminist, grapple with Molly’s apparent calling. 

As editor Erin Bartnett says in her introduction to the story: “Written entirely in the second person, ‘your mother’ is the one who cries, ‘Why do you have to punish yourself to be good?’ And ‘you’ are the one who wants ‘to explain to your mother that you have a sensual life too: you are seeking a greater intimacy with God.’ You, the reader, by way of Hurley’s lyrical prose, are lulled into identifying with Molly. But no, wait, of course, not you—you don’t want to be a nun, do you? The magic trick of this back-and-forth between recognition and alienation, is that you end up feeling, at the most intimate level, what it must be like to be Molly and also what it’s like to be her mother.” —BT

“The Bird Is a System” by Gabrielle Hovendon

An easy way to piss off someone born in the early- to mid-1980s is to call them a millennial. The bounds of the generation are technically 1981 to 1996, but few people born before 1986 are willing to identify as such. This defensiveness is a compelling reason for “The Bird is a System” by Gabrielle Hovendon, a story about millennial malaise, to be written in second person. Every person who reads it—even, or especially, the millennials—will resist believing “you” applies to them. 

The narrator, a recent college graduate, is working at a down-and-out owl sanctuary while she contemplates her life goals, purpose, and romantic possibilities. Throughout the story, the narrator capitalizes phrases like “Thrive Under Pressure,” “Following a Nontraditional Path,” and “Building Character.” One has the impression that these phrases are not organic to her, they are inherited from parents and career counselors; people who have placed expectations on her that she has been unable to fulfill. People who started most of their sentences  with “you should” and “you have to.” Along with the second person, these phrases signify the distance between her life as it is happening, shoveling owl shit and flinging mouse carcasses, and her life as she expected it, which, she begins to realize, she never bothered to picture with any specificity. 

Hovendon also makes excellent use of the transportive properties of the second person, finding unexpected beauty in the owl sanctuary: “All around you, the evening insect sounds were beginning. Lightning bugs speckled the aviary.” As the narrator gives herself over to indecision, to the particular joys of being in medias res, so too does the reader give themselves over to the second person’s direct address. Maybe it isn’t so bad to be an aimless twentysomething, a life full of possibility ahead of you. —HM

“Maroon” by Ladi Opaluwa

“Maroon” by Ladi Opaluwa is a story about sexual violence, an experience that defies narration. The narrator, a 19-year-old unnamed woman, is studying in her dorm room, listening to a thunderstorm outside, when she is interrupted by an uninvited visitor: “You did not hear Pastor James knock.” The sentence is simply and immediately terrifying. Every time I read it, I feel that knock in the bottom of my lungs. Pastor James, we come to learn, is the leader of the Spring Living fellowship that the narrator is also a part of. 

In this story, the second person POV is operating on complex registers. The second person creates a reflective but separate experience of the trauma for the narrator to relate, as one would describe the face in the mirror. You, but not you. But Ladi Opaluwa also deftly uses the second person to subvert the power dynamic, putting the narrator in control of the storytelling, and submerging the reader into the immediacy of being acted upon: “You knew where he was going but wanted to be sure, to wait and see, to be a spectator over yourself, a witness to your own calamity.” It makes the reader “a spectator over yourself” in a visceral way, and asks what it means to witness. —EB

The post So You Want to Write in the Second Person appeared first on Electric Literature.

The Greek chorus—originally a performance of 50 men singing and dancing a dithyramb for Dionysus in the 6th century CE—evolved into a mostly passive group of tellers, offering moral and social commentary on the action of a play from the sidelines. Their role was to connect what was happening to larger historical themes, or other plays, but they generally did not engage directly with the actors. Overtime, the chorus has been adopted and adapted in contemporary fiction, sometimes being pushed right into the action of the short story. 

John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction, calls the first person plural point of view (the “we” voice) the “town POV.” Citing “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, in which the townspeople of Jefferson, Mississippi investigate the life and death of a reclusive woman. Gardner suggests that these kinds of stories often foreground a secret. There’s something or someone “we” don’t know and “we” will get to the bottom of it. In this kind of story the choral POV is both the witness and the judge.  The townspeople, speaking as one body, have their own motivations, and manipulate the story to their advantage. Because they are separated from the action of the story, their telling necessitates a lot of guesswork. This dynamic puts the writer in a tricky place: if the townspeople can only speculate on what is going on, how can the reader trust this narrative mob to tell the story? 

They can’t really, and that’s part of the fun. Part of what builds tension in the first person plural story is that the reader can’t really trust the narrators—it’s an inherently uneasy perspective. A common pitfall in these stories occurs when the author constructs the “we” as an unknowable, omniscient teller. By making them anonymous, they absolve them of responsibility. Stories that pull off the narrative “we” shape the narrators as they would any other character. They engage with the limits of what the group can do and can know. 

We the editors of Recommended Reading (Halimah, Brandon, and Erin) have selected three stories from the archives with first person plural narrators. From a pair of siblings, to a nosy neighborhood, to a production crew, they show, in different ways, how collective voices can create belonging and strength as well as alienation and conflict. 

“Neighbors” by Anthony Tognazzini

As Halimah Marcus states in her intro, “Anthony Tognazzini’s ‘Neighbors’ is a story of watching. A group of undistinguished townspeople stalk a woman whose great sins are that she is unmarried and lives on the outskirts of town. Her base offenses are compounded by further peculiarities: Sheila does not work for a company (she freelances!), she has a cat (‘we are dog people’), and, according to the police, ‘she might be a lesbian.’”

One of the pleasures of a plural first person story in a story like “Neighbors” is that it creates an immediate tension. As in all stories of surveillance, there is a voyeur and there is the observed. What heightens this dynamic is that the voyeur is not one set of eyes, but an entire town of eyeballs tracking and judging the movements of one woman, an outcast. The story is relayed by this collective consciousness, giving it a sense of irony and menace because the reader has access to the blindspots and biases of the collective. We understand the information as relayed to be skewed, unreliable.  This comes through via Tognazzini’s skillful use of tone and detail. For example, when the police confront the neighbors outside of Sheila’s house, they relay their plan and reflect, “We thought of ourselves as scientists, analyzing Sheila from a clinical distance, looking through her window as if through a microscope. We thought of ourselves as operatives, collecting intelligence for the sake of national security.” It’s a wonderful trick of a point of view, one that is active rather than passive. —BT

“A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find” by Ha Jin

In Ha Jin’s “A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find,” a TV crew has received praise from the government for their TV series Wu Song Fought the Tiger. If they can respond to one small criticism (“the tiger looked fake, and didn’t present an authentic challenge to the hero”), the show will be sent to Beijing to compete for a national prize. The TV crew—our collective narrator—is tasked first with finding a tiger. As the title suggests, finding an authentic tiger is easy. The authentic hero is the harder one to find. The actor, Huping Wang, looks like a great tiger fighter, but is actually a pretty wimpy one. 

Perspective is doing so much work in “Tiger Fighter.” The charm of the story, in part, is what this crew, and thereby the reader, focuses on—where to sell tiger testicles, how much alcohol is enough alcohol to get a man to forget his fear, and what to do with a schizophrenic actor who looks the part but can’t play it. Told in first person plural POV, the themes of the story harmonize with the reality of the story. The yawning gap between collective artistic ideals and flawed human actors becomes a literal problem for the crew adapting a novel for TV: “In private, some of us — clerks, assistants, actors — complained about the classic novel that contains the tiger-fighting episode. Why did the author write such a difficult scene? It’s impossible for any man to ride a tiger and then beat it to death bare-handed. The story is a pure fabrication that has misled readers for hundreds of years. It may have been easy for the writer to describe it on paper, but in reality, how could we create such a hero?” 

There’s a wink in that line. Ha Jin has written another great literary scene resistant to adaptation. And while Ha Jin might make it look easy to describe such a scene, he’s let the whole crew show us just how impossible it can be to get it right. —EB

“Rope” by Joshua Harmon

In Joshua Harmon’s haunting story, “Rope,” two siblings believe their older brother Jaime keeps a girl tied to a tree in the woods: “When we first found out that our brother keeps a girl tied to a tree in the woods, we did not think to tell anyone.” They speculate about his behaviors, his methods, and motivations, but they do not question their underlying assumption that there is a girl tied to a tree in the woods. Nor does the reader learn how they “found out,” that moment when their murky inferences crystalized into a belief. 

An uncareful reader might take the siblings’ speculation as fact—might miss the hearsay, the lake of visual confirmation, the invention of detail—and misunderstand this story for one of violence rather than imagination. Harmon understands that it’s easier for young children to invent a fantasy than it is for them to come up with logical explanations. If their older brother sneaks out of the house to see a girl, the carnal mystery at the center of that action must be explained without carnal knowledge. 

My favorite sentence in the story reveals the depth of the siblings’ compassion and longing to understand. It also exemplifies the layers of perspective at work here: “We think, sometimes, Mindy and I, that we would know the answers to all of our questions about the girl our brother keeps tied to a tree if only we could know her name.” The individual narrator of “Rope,” whose name and gender we do not know, is hidden within the “we,” the narrator and their sister Mindy. The way the “we” envelopes the “I”—the way the pair subsumes the individual—shows how integral groups, even small ones, are to entrenching misconceptions. —HM

The post We Need To Talk About First Person Plural appeared first on Electric Literature.

Certain writers—childless, professional writers—will tell you that being in quarantine is not markedly different from their regular lives. They spend a lot of time alone, they will tell you. They go for walks, they think, they write. No matter your circumstances, whether you lead the “ideal” writer’s life or one of mess and chaos, your writing must be done alone.

The particular isolation of writing has led many writers to concoct stories in which their protagonists are also isolated. In most of these stories, nothing happens, unless you count the protagonist thinking as something happening. (I usually don’t, but these three stories prove that exceptions exist.) Stories with a solitary character can be, but aren’t necessarily, about the condition of loneliness. With the caveat that not everyone who is alone is lonely, and a lonely person can be surrounded by people, the reason these stories are particularly challenging to pull off is that aloneness and loneliness lend themselves to static stories of futile longing. Interactions, on the other hand, lead to plot. Like all of us in our new lives, the characters in these stories have nowhere to go.

At a time when interactions with other people seem like a distant memory, we look at three examples of short stories from the Recommended Reading archives about characters in isolation. In each, there is only one character who is physically present. Pets are permitted, and other characters are allowed to call or radio in, but they cannot interact with the protagonist in person except in memories or flashbacks, even if they remain six feet away.

“Watching Mysteries with My Mother” by Ben Marcus

This story takes the form of an extended intrusive thought regarding the death of the narrator’s mother. Even as he rationalizes away the possibility that she might die, he finds steadily more reasons that suggest that she will die, setting up the tension of the story that takes place quite literally only in his head. Writers are warned against stories where all a character does is sit and think, stories where there isn’t a present thread of action because stories this kind often lack obvious and urgent emotional stakes. But here Marcus clearly illustrates the tense, swirling eddy of anxiety and neurosis that plague us when we are alone with our thoughts. It’s an eerie story to revisit, and I find myself thinking of my own intrusive thoughts and all of the little rationalizations I erect against my anxiety even as I knock them over with still greater worry. The key to Marcus’s story is the escalating intensity and absurdity of the intrusive thought, the subtle echoes and repetitions that build up like an involuntary tic. It’s a dazzling display of the interior narration, as gripping and compelling as any exploding building. – BT

“The Adventure of the Space Traveler” by Seth Fried

One way to get around nothing happening in a story with only one character is to make the inciting event—the event that isolates that character in the first place—as eventful as possible. Fried wastes no time doing this, thoroughly isolating his protagonist in the first sentence:

“While repairing a communications dish outside the space station Triumph I, Arnold Barington inadvertently fired his rivet gun into a tank of pressurized gas. In the resulting explosion, Barington was thrown out like a dart into the vacuum of space at roughly five thousand feet per second.” 

For good measure, Fried also breaks Barington’s radio. 

The story is off to an exciting start, but the reader knows that Barington will not survive. (He isn’t Sandra Bullock in Gravity.) Fried must employ methods other than suspense to keep the reader’s attention. He gives Barington a futuristic spacesuit that will keep him alive for 5.6 years and Barington holds out hope that this will give him enough time to be rescued. Just like that there is tension—the tension between Barington’s hope and our discomfort—even if there isn’t suspense. 

Next, Fried solves the problem of plot with the ingenuity Barington wishes he had, bringing to life a mix of Barington’s imaginings and regrets. The infinite void of deep space functions as a darkened theater, the visor of Barington’s own helmet is the screen, where his regrets play out as if they are happening in real time. A similar character might have the same thoughts when facing a more conventional death, but that story would have felt conventional, where this one is possessed by thrilling inertia. – HM

“The Duchess of Albany” by Christine Schutt

I’ve been thinking a lot about this line in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets: “It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” For the protagonist of Chrstine Shutt’s story, solitude was what she and her husband practiced in their large home with many windows and their rich, ever-demanding garden. (The protagonist is unnamed, so I will call her “the gardener.”) Dignified and dreamy, the gardener is, as Diane Williams writes in her introduction to the story, “an older woman in extremis.” The problem Schutt introduces in the first sentence—the problem that turns solitude into loneliness—is death. The gardener’s husband, Owen, has died. The garden, filled with his ashes, must still be kept alive. Now, her only companion is their old, dust rag of a dog named Pink, who is always relieving himself in the wrong places. She endures the occasional call from her twin daughters, who prattle on about her vodka habit. 

Schutt creates tension in the story by intermingling the gardener’s memories of her life with Owen with her actions in the present. Often, the only signpost we have to distinguish between memory and contemporary action, is Owen’s presence in the event. For another writer, this kind of story might prove impossible to pull off. But Christine Schutt’s prose is so precise and wry, and the gardener’s interiority so intimately drawn, that you keep reading just to get closer to this woman who wants nothing to do with you. 

By the end of “Duchess of Albany” Christine Schutt shows us that while the experience of losing a beloved is lonely, one is never completely alone in loss. Those memories, for a time at least, are still filled with so much life. Christine Schutt finds dignity there. – EB

The post How to Turn Real-Life Isolation Into Fiction appeared first on Electric Literature.

In the first installment of Read Like A Writer, we discussed how to write an ending that is surprising yet inevitable. In this installment, we’re going to talk about another way to build momentum in narrative by thinking about how that “surprise” element can be turned into suspense. Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the difference between surprise and suspense by inviting you to imagine a bomb under the table. If neither the characters nor the audience knows about the bomb, and it goes off, that’s a surprise. If the audience knows about the bomb, but the characters do not, and the audience anticipates the bomb going off, that is the suspense. The key difference is dramatic irony, that old dusty literary concept we all learned in high school. 

But dramatic irony has much subtler applications than high school curriculum allows. Alice Munro opened my mind to the potential of dramatic irony and it’s painful pleasures with her story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” In it, a woman named Johanna goes to work for a man and his teenage granddaughter, Sabitha. Johanna is an object of mockery for the Sabitha and her friend Edith because she lacks fashionable clothes and interests. Sabitha and Edith begin writing Johanna love letters that purport to be from the Sabitha’s’s father, and Johanna falls in love with the father through letters he did not write. Eventually, she writes that she is coming to live with him, packs up, and leaves.

I experienced this short story like a horror movie, my dread mounting, my palms sweating. My compassion for Johanna grew proportionally to my certainty that she would be heartbroken and humiliated. But Munro, the master, would never do something so predictable and cheap. When Johanna goes to live with the father (spoilers here), they fall in love and live happily ever after. 

Even when a story isn’t dealing with bombs, dramatic irony is often something that is set and later deployed. The dramatic irony in “Hateship, Friendship” is that I, the reader, know something Johanna does not, which is the true author of the love letters. Munro uses that knowledge to heighten the emotion of my reading experience, and then deploys it in a self-aware way that undermines my expectations. 

We can’t all be as good as Munro, but we can borrow a few tricks. Here are three stories from the Recommended Reading archives that deploy dramatic irony in complex and unexpected ways of their own. – HM

“A Beautiful Wife is Suddenly Dead” by Margaret Meehan

In Margaret Meehan’s “A Beautiful Wife Is Suddenly Dead,” Karen Roberts wants a made-for-TV life. A high school English teacher who cliff-noted her way through her own education, Karen prefers to imagine herself as a character in another story—a teacher whose “students might erupt into applause, hearts bursting, changed forever” à la Dead Poets Society. After school hours, she fantasizes about the countless, brutally murdered women in her favorite true crime shows, now suddenly beautiful and talented in the past tense. She opts for hair extensions, long red nails, and smooth, waxed skin. She has a husband and she tolerates him, but mostly she’s annoyed he’s not willing to play a more interesting role than “doting husband.” Karen is what some might call “basic,” and what others might call “unlikeable.”  

But from the very first line of the story, we know that Karen’s story is going to get less basic: “Karen Roberts is going to fall out the window.” It’s quintessential dramatic irony—we know Karen is going to fall, she doesn’t. In her introduction to the story, Halimah Marcus calls the opening line of the story a dare. It’s fun to think about dramatic irony as a dare. Like dares, which are performed for the cringing pleasure of others, dramatic irony often relies on a sense of dread. We know something terrible is going to happen, but the character is blissfully ignorant in a way that allows them to continue living out their lives. There’s a measure of schadenfreude fueling our progress from paragraph to paragraph. 

In “A Beautiful Wife,” the feeling powering our experience of the story may start off as dread, but as we get to know Karen, and her obsession with true crime shows, their “miraculous recasting of mediocrity in death,” our dread lifts into something more like delight. Who is Karen, this unapologetically vain woman who is kind of okay with being a beautiful dead one? Meehan subtly guides our attention by creating an unflinching portrait of an unlikeable woman who dreams of living at the center of a more dramatic life. We’re consuming her like she consumes true crime. But she’s not like those other true crime girls. The story dares you to care about Karen, to care about whether or not she gets what she wants. – EB

“PU-239” by Ken Kalfus

“Pu-239” by Ken Kalfus is about a disgruntled employee at a Russian nuclear power plant, who, after an accident, steals weapon-grade plutonium to sell on the black market. Timofey’s health has been compromised by the accident, which exposed him to radiation. He knows he will likely die prematurely, and he has nothing to leave his family. The money he makes from the sale will be his life insurance. 

Fiona Maazel introduced the story when we published it in 2013. “It would undersell the story to suggest it’s just a satire,” she wrote. “No, this fiction has the higher aim of ennobling stupidity — of recognizing its power and aptitude for destruction.” The stupidity she’s referring to here is, at least to start, Timofey walking around Moscow with plutonium stored in a coffee can, strapped to his chest. 

It’s not that knowing that Timofey will die that creates the dramatic irony—he knows that too, on some level. Even a person with the most cursory knowledge of nuclear physics knows how catastrophically idiotic Timofey’s behavior is. This tension between the reader’s commonsense knowledge and the character’s reckless actions—the tension encapsulated in Maazel’s phrase “ennobling stupidity”—is where the true dramatic irony lies. Knowing what’s going to happen won’t drive a story; dreading it does. – HM

“Alta’s Place” by Morgan Thomas

“Alta’s Place” charts Cory’s growing fascination with Alta, an enigmatic woman who appears one evening at the dry cleaner where Cory works with a coffee stain on her suit. Through their conversation, retold by Cory, we come to understand how Alta’s suit was stained during an asylum interview, and the circumstances under which Alta left her native Mongolia for Virginia. Her landlord discovered her living with another woman with whom she was in a romantic relationship and evicted her, an initial cruelty that had the ripple effect of forcing her to leave the country entirely.

In a subtle and masterful deployment of first-person point of view, the reader sees Alta as a kind of doubled. That is, we see Alta through her own words in scene and quoted dialogue, but we also see the narrator’s warped version of Alta. Morgan Thomas deftly reveals the ways Cory’s perception of Alta is curtailed by her own limited experience and by a tendency to objectify and exoticize. 

The dramatic irony that brings this story to its masterful and subtle conclusion stems from the gap between who Cory understands Alta to be and who Alta actually is. As a queer woman herself, Cory is alert to the realities of queer life in America, but she is at times inattentive to Alta’s reality and subtly invalidating of her experiences, eldiding them, wanting to make them smaller, more manageable than they are. Again and again, Cory references wanting to draw Alta. To touch her clothing. To eat her food. To become her, in a way. But Cory doesn’t question these impulses. She is unaware of this tendency in herself, but it is carefully wrought and visible for the reader, giving rise to a tension as we wait for it all to become clear to her. – BT

The post How To Use Dramatic Irony for More Than Shenanigans appeared first on Electric Literature.

Flannery O’Connor allegedly said that endings should be “surprising yet inevitable.” Whether or not she actually said this, the internet will not easily verify. But it does apply well to her stories, most notably “Good Country People” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” (Or as we like to think of them together “A Good Country Man Is Hard to Find.”) The experience of reading to the end of these stories is certainly surprising—in the first, a lonely academic woman’s leg is stolen by a “simple” bible salesman, in the second, a grandmother is executed point blank by an escaped convict—but inevitable? It’s only in retrospect and through subsequent readings that you realize O’Connor doled out the material for those endings from the first page. Inevitability is crafted: it’s what separates “surprising,” which energizes the reader, from “a twist,” which makes the reader feel tricked. 

The idea that endings should be surprising yet inevitable is an escalation of something Aristotle wrote in his Poetics: That the “change of fortune” should “arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action.” Sometimes “necessary” is translated as “inevitable.” (We’re using the S.H. Butler translation offered by the Internet Classics Archive.) 

Aristotle’s request is reasonable—that the action follows a chain of cause and effect—where as O’Connor’s edict seems oxymoronic, even impossible. And yet, there are writers who continue to pull it off. In fiction, when every sentence is subject to change, written out of order, and endlessly revised, endings are built piece-by-piece. So how do these writers do it? How do they signal the ending without giving away the surprise? 

For the first edition of Read Like A Writer, we’ve selected three stories from the Recommended Reading archives that deliver a surprise and not a trick. These stories showcase a range of surprising endings—from unexpected to shocking—and offer lessons in how the tools of tone, plot, and character are used.

The following stories are by definition very easy to spoil. We’ve done our best not to give away specifics, but if you want a pure, unadulterated surprising but inevitable reading experience, we suggest you read them before the analysis.

“Wintering Over” by Jason Brown

The writing prompt for “Wintering Over” might as well have been: think of a person’s worst secret, one that they have never told anyone. A secret that is as devastating as it is criminal. Now, reverse engineer the story that would move that person to share their secret for the first time. 

Charlotte and Nathan are “wintering over” in an old, rickety house in Maine. She’s a potter and he’s a writer, and the cold and the isolation wears at Nathan’s creativity. Neither enjoy their new home, but neither are willing to admit it. Soon Nathan is in a full blown bought of writer’s block, worthy of the Overlook Hotel. During their stay and the hours she increasingly spends alone, Charlotte reflects on the summers she spent with her family in Minnesota, a place that feels opposite to Maine in season and setting but related by freedom from responsibility. She was outside of life there as she is here, and neither place is particularly happy. Their stay concludes with a staggering confession. To bring Charlotte to the place necessary for her to tell Nathan her secret, Brown makes use of every tool available to him as a writer: setting, circumstance, weather, character, memory, emotion, and theme. Without the reader noticing, every aspect of the story is working, but not pointing, to the end. 

When you’re having trouble finding the right ending, the first thing to do is to take a thorough inventory of everything you’ve already written. If the ending is going to be surprising yet inevitable, its seeds are already planted. There might be something you can use that you’ve overlooked. A character who left but can come back, a step that’s always creaking, a lie that was told. “Wintering Over” is an excellent example of where the ending might hide. The surprising element here doesn’t come from a plot turn, an action, or an event that changes the course of the narrative. The surprise comes from a memory; it comes from the past.

“Valentine” by Alexander Yates

A common downfall for story endings is the “flinch”––when a story inches up close to something emotionally scary, and then, instead of pushing deeper, pulls up and away from the very thing the story is most interested in. “Valentine” by Alexander Yates does not flinch.

Sandra works at a flower shop in a small town to which she’s recently relocated. When she leaves for work on Valentine’s Day, she finds a bloody beef heart on her porch. The meat has been stabbed with something like cupid’s arrow. Sandra looks closer. Actually, it’s a metal bolt. You, reader, might be surprised. But Sandra? “She’s surprised and then not surprised to see it,” Yates writes, because she already knows who has done this. Sandra scans the street and spots her stalker sitting naked in a rental car, staring at her from a legally-permissible distance away. 

How can the story escalate from here? In part, “Valentine” raises the stakes by contrasting the chaos of the stalker with the lawfulness of Sandra’s new life, where her friends make up the small town establishment. There’s Molly the emergency dispatcher, who is engaged to the sheriff. And there’s Sandra’s new boyfriend, the deputy, aka “Deputy Jeff,” whom Sandra dates at Molly’s encouragement. 

As the tension between Deputy Jeff and the stalker grows, the story moves towards an ending that is more inevitable than it is surprising. The end, we know, will involve a confrontation. But when that confrontation occurs, no one in the scene looks away, not Sandra, not the stalker, and especially not Yates. “Valentine” proves that there’s a way of surprising the reader by fearlessly facing the story you’ve set up, and carrying it through to the painful end. The surprise isn’t what happens, it’s how it happens, and how it makes you feel. 

“Ball” by Tara Ison

“Ball” by Tara Ison has the most out-there ending of any of the stories on this list, a classic “what the fuck?” plot swerve that makes you immediately return to the start, asking, “What makes this story think it can get away with this?” And then you reread the first few paragraphs and realize, “Oh, that’s why.”

“Ball,” as Rick Moody writes in his introdution, “is a truly outrageous story about contemporary relationships, sex, and dog ownership.” He also calls the story honest, tragicomic, astringent, and provocative.

The narrator is dating a guy named Eric. They have amazing sex but she doesn’t take him seriously. She plays games with him, like going on a long trip without telling him, just to keep him at a distance. The narrator also plays games with her dog Tess, who is obsessed with “ball” and can never be satisfied. This all seems fairly normal, except the narrator devotes most of the first paragraph to Tess’s “prettiest little dog vagina.” Her description is at once affectionate and disturbingly medical: “It’s a tidy, quarter-inch slit in a pinky-tip protuberance of skin, delicate and irrelevant and veiled with fine, apricot hair.” Who hasn’t looked at their dog’s vagina, but also, who has described it so precisely? 

While you’re busy either justifying or pathologizing the narrator’s behavior, little do you know, dear reader, that this story has been preparing you for its outrageous conclusion by challenging your expectations of the action that follows the jokes.

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